Peter I feel for you, but take heart.

Your published works here on OLO on the face of it are pearls cast before swine. Take comfort in that there are, I am sure, the few that stroll through and feel the freshness of the breeze that your thoughts create.

As for the ignorant and the fool, in your posts we watch you confirm your human barrenness and aridity. What is your joy? Where is your peace?

Tao sounds like a bitter old commie - with his dreams smashed when the Pope's divisions ( Stalin - "how many divisions does the Pope have?" ), in the form of one man of his time, riding the decades of prayer for the "conversion of Russia", acted as the vanguard to create the collapse of this horrendous human folly. Karl Marx must wish he read another source for his social analysis.

And Boaz you too need a shake up. Your anti Catholic and anti Islam prejudices do you no merit as a supposed faithful man. They display an ignorance and a perverse sense of self satisfaction in your "saved state", with your God seemingly arranged in a nice little package. Life's messy mate. The Church, yesterday, today and tomorrow comprises fine humans and messy characters; especially in its aberrational days of worldly power. However, over 2000 years she has not done a bad job, still united under one leader linked back to Peter, and requiring nothing of the world other than the freedom to preach the Word.

Sells, is there not the "now but not yet" sense of the Kingdom of God? In that the awakening, awareness and personal response to the God relationship in Jesus' "come and follow me" does give a glimpse through heart and mind (joy&peace) of final union with God.

My experience of recent grief has a sense of personal missed opportunity within a long loving relationship. Humanly, what a loss, it would be to die having missed the opportunity on earth to experience the human reality of the "now but not yet" as an anticipation of the eternal now.

boxgum,
We recognise your good Roman Catholic adherence to its dogma and to submitt yourself to one man as "must be obeyed", with the statement: "Boaz ... Your anti Catholic and anti Islam prejudices do you no merit as a supposed faithful man. They display an ignorance and a perverse sense of self satisfaction in your "saved state", with your God seemingly arranged in a nice little package. Life's messy mate.... However, over 2000 years she has not done a bad job, still united under one leader linked back to Peter, and requiring nothing of the world other than the freedom to preach the Word."

However within the Catholic Church there are those that oppose positions held by the Pope, and I find them honourable and deeply spiritual people. As Christians we are linked to the God of Christ Jesus, not to Peter or Paul.

Until recently we had purgatory and indulgences espoused by the RC Church, concepts from Zoroaster not Christ. Thank God for those that opposed dogma espoused by the RC Church to release us from being subject to the ideas of one man.

They is a varied range of responses and at times difficult to follow, at least for me, and perhaps a little clarification always helps...

Marxism and religion are on opposite ends of the spectrum...as in one says all we have is this life on earth then its nothing when we die, to how we choose to live here now will determine how our soul continues in the after-life...

Now this can also be reflected as levels of 'spiritual awareness' as in Karl Marx has almost none to rely on (a presumption from what he wrote) to Christ and Mohammed (eg a presumption again as Christ did not write a word...everything in the new testament is effectively hearsay, which is not to say it is any different to what christ said... but it is the human writers interpretation of what christ said...this caution should be applied when one reads the new testament and keep in mind, and that a number of texts that were controversial was not included by scholars in the new testament like 'Book of Tomas')

And so a less 'spiritually awoken' person is going to rely on facts that relate to them, and conversely a more spiritually awoken person on facts more to their understanding. We are all on the same road of spirituality, just at different distance travelled, and no one is better or worse for where they are on it... Just keep searching and keep a sense of your soul... and your acts for where the force of destruction stands strong creation cannot and vise versa and so eternal war between the two...

Sam

Boxgum. I think the reason this article does not get across is that it is difficult to dislodge popular notions about heaven. Part of this comes from a mistranslation of the Greek word aiwnos into eternal meaning endless time. Rather, phrases like “eternal life” do not refer to endless life after death but a sharing in the life of God her and now, or in the “now but not yet” as you correctly observe. I think this is another way of referring to the kingdom of heaven/god, it is eschatological, it lives in the tension of present and future fulfillment. So as soon as we mention heaven a cluster of concepts is evoked: death, life after death, endless time, judgment, the alternative hell and speculation about what it would be like to live for eternity without the body. Much of this has been caused by the intrusion of neoPlatonic thought that tells us that our true lives are with God on the other side of death. This world becomes reduced to a place of trial that will determine our eternal home.

This makes it very difficult pastorally since many people still believe in the afterlife particularly the unchurched. Unfortunately the idea of the communion of saints has been turned into this kind of life after death with the faithful. Rather, this has to do with the life of the church and the memory of those who have gone before in the faith, the saints and martyrs. Thus we may still use the phrase “Gone to God” to describe those who have died in the faith, they have become part of the cloud of witnesses that have gone before us.

One of the most important realizations is the Jesus was a Jew and Jews had no concept of body soul dualism. Therefore they could not understand the concept of disembodied life. I Cor 15 needs proper exegesis.

Sells, "This makes it very difficult pastorally since many people still believe in the afterlife particularly the unchurched."

I found that an interesting comment, whilst many unchurched may have some kind of belief in an afterlife the "particularly" bit seems wrong. I'd guess that most get those ideas from the preaching of the churched.

I'm confident that most of the churched on these forums (BD, coach, and friends) believe very strongly in an afterlife and are getting that message regularly from their churches, home groups evangelistic rallies etc. One of the central platforms of the evangelical church is the idea of an eternal afterlife where those who "turn to Jesus" get their undeserved reward and those who don't get their Oh so deserved punishment.

During many years of being churched (Anglican and evangelical) I never heard any preacher seriously suggesting that there was no eternal life. If there is merit in your interpretation of the bible it is not a view which is widely shared by the churched.

R0bert

RObert.
Belief in the afterlife is an almost universal religious idea that occurs in most cultures and acts as an antidote to the finality of death. As such we are in the sphere of anthropology rather than Christian theology. The idea is in the culture, that is what I meant that it exists in the unchurched. In both the denominations that I have belonged to the afterlife is not a big issue but it would be a brave preacher to address the subject honestly.

My argument with Christian evangelicalism is that the faith is reduced to the dynamics you referred to. As such it is manipulative. But I do not see evidence for this view in the bible. Well…. There is evidence if you take a certain interpretative stance. The success of evangelicalism is that it reduces faith to the kind of transaction that most can understand.

If you read contemporary theology of the mainstream you will not find anything about the afterlife. Rather, the issues among biblical scholars is the different kind of eschatology found in the gospels. In John, for example we have a realised eschatology, the kingdom is established when Jesus is lifted up on the cross. In the others it is “now but not yet”.

I have the feeling that my interlocutors on this page work with a stereotypical understanding of what actually happens in church based on either an outdated Roman or fundamentalist versions. That is why we are at such cross purposes and not more than with this present article.